


He Wasn't Joking

by chasing_the_sterek



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, Exhaustion, Gen, Guilt, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Paranoia, Sleep Deprivation, but it came to me and i wanted to, soooo, sorry i wrote this people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-17
Updated: 2016-03-17
Packaged: 2018-05-27 08:57:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6278005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chasing_the_sterek/pseuds/chasing_the_sterek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dipper deals with the aftermath of the Sock Opera, but maybe isolating himself from everyone is the wrong way to go about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Wasn't Joking

**Author's Note:**

> This is kind of a character study for Dipper. Don't mind me.

_Eyes.  
_  
They're everywhere, once you start to look for them, and it's driving Dipper crazy.

And he's not talking about regular eyes, like a stranger on the street has - two eyes, normally about the same colour, about the same size, about the same shape. He's talking about Bill Cipher eyes - one, unblinking, yellow, slits instead of pupils, the works.

They're everywhere.

They're in the leaves of the trees as he walks in the forest. They're in the tree trunks as he's sitting in the back of Stan's car, heading into town for shopping or a meal at Greasy's. They're stallholder and shopkeeper's eyes, flashing yellow like Bipper's eyes for the briefest of milliseconds before returning to their normal colour. They're in the eyes of Mabel's sewing needles and in the tip of her grappling hook and on the foreheads of some of the people on her plethora of posters. They're blinking, in between the tips/prongs of Grunkle Stan's weird crescent symbol thing on his hat, for an instant before fading into the burgundy-red that part of the hat's always been. They're in reflections of himself, sometimes - shop windows and mirrors and shards of glass in the corner of his eye - and they're often staring up at him from triangular shapes like they're meant to be there.

Dipper knows it's Bill playing tricks on him, but that doesn't stop the paranoia, doesn't stop the echo of the demon's voice that repeats _always watching always watching always watching_ in his head like some unhealthy mantra, doesn't stop his pulse skyrocketing whenever he sees a flash of yellow (it's a child running past with a bright yellow shoulder bag, giggling and cheering as she races her friend to the park) or catches a momentary glimpse of a wide white eye in his peripheral vision.

It doesn't stop the fact that whenever he closes his eyes he's out of his body again, adrift in the mindscape, lost in a world he couldn't even begin to comprehend, watching Bill parade his body in front of a mirror and pour fizzy soda in his eyes and say _boy, these arms are durable_ as he smacks the drawer closed against the flesh, again and again and again and _again._ It doesn't stop the cheerful threats to his family lining the borders of every dream he has, doesn't stop the feeling that he's dealing with something on not even a millimeter of the intelligence he should have to face an adversary like Bill and hope to win.

Dipper knows it's just Bill being an ass, but it doesn't make anything go away. It doesn't stop the paranoia and the nightmares and the endless, endless worrying.

Just because a fear of something is irrational doesn't mean you can just get over it with a snap of your fingers.

_Snapping fingers._

Every footstep sounds like a thunderclap, in the days following the Sock Opera Incident (as Mabel has taken to calling it). Every tap from Stan's eight-ball cane, smacked against the floor to quiet a rowdy tour group, Dipper jumps like he's been electrified. Every nerve is on end, his mind frazzled and overworked and panicked.

Sometimes it's worse.

You pass a stranger on the street just as they snap their fingers and cheer. You zero in on the snap automatically, eyes flashing to the source, mind racing back to the snap of Bill's black fingers, slowing the moment down until it's in slow motion, extending the snap of the dream demon until it feels like it goes on forever. Then you snap out of it, but you see the man shake hands with his friend, settling the odds for their bet -  
 _  
Shaking hands. A deal.  
_  
Dipper never noticed how much people shook hands until he was hyper-aware of the action.

Blue flames dance in his vision, encasing the hands as the join and showing the deal being made. Dipper knows that's probably not Bill - most likely his mind, playing tricks on him - but he can't help but wonder if the demon wants to drive him insane. Dipper can't be that big of a threat to dote this much time over - he assumes that Bill has much, much bigger fish to fry than him - so he's itching to know why Bill's doing this and what his aim is. The question grates at his mind like an insistent five-year-old who wants a story you can't give them, making his already abysmal sleeping pattern even worse as he stays up, mulling over the exact same information as he had the previous night and flipping through the well-worn pages of his long-memorised journal. He's pretty sure he has it memorised, that he has had for a long while, now, but he never noticed the hidden messages in invisible ink, so why not something else?

The bags under his eyes become the norm for him. He grows used to getting up when Mabel does, grows used to slower reflexes and eyes slipping shut during quiet moments at the register only to snap open because he can't sleep, can't sleep, there's too much to do, too much to think about, too many eyes to count and snaps of fingers to flinch at and deals to analyse.

Bill wasn't kidding when he said he'd always be watching.  
 __  
"Are you okay, Dipper?" Mabel asks one night, her legs kicking at thin air as they hang over the edge of the roof. They're out watching the stars, neither tired (Dipper is, but he can't go to sleep, can't go to sleep, so he lies and says he's wide awake).

_"Of course," he lies, eyes scanning, scanning. No eyes, but that wasn't a reassurance because they could appear and disappear in a quarter of a heartbeat. "Why wouldn't I be?"_

_"Is this about when Bill possessed you?" Mabel presses. She sounds worried, but Dipper can't focus much on it because he catches a star melt into an eye and then back again._

_"Is what about when Bill possessed me?" He replies, feigning ignorance._

_Mabel sighs and lets it go._

_Guilt squeezes in between paranoia and exhaustion, and that doesn't seem to want to let go either._


End file.
